Vintage and Antique Books
Make It Work: Street Style for the Sensitive German Renaissance Man
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — It’s 1520 in Augsburg, Germany, a bustling cosmopolitan city at the height of the Northern Renaissance. On his 23rd birthday, Matthäus Schwarz, a successful accountant with a flair for dressing well, launches a special project he calls his or “little book of clothes.” Schwarz had been fascinated by historic clothing trends since he was a child, and like many at the time, he was inspired to experiment with new media, blurring the boundaries of art, fashion, and self-representation. “In my...
The Gay Old Days: If You Really Want To See San Francisco's Future, Go Back to 1957
By Ben Marks — This year, senior citizens around the San Francisco Bay Area are celebrating the 50th anniversary of a three-word phrase coined in a 1967 press release. From April through August, you’ll find many of these former hippies, their flowing gray hair an incongruous contrast to their brightly colored tie-dye, shuffling through the normally serene galleries of the De Young Museum, where they pause to admire indecipherable concert posters, hand-patched bell-bottom jeans, killer rock photography, and...
When Medieval Monks Couldn't Cure the Plague, They Launched a Luxe Skincare Line
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Long before the modern deluge of organic soaps, herbal remedies, juice cleanses, and lifestyle brands like Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP, the mindful crowd had a medieval-era source for all-natural panaceas: the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella. Roughly translated as the “Perfume-Pharmaceutical Workshop of New Saint Mary’s Church,” this world-renowned cosmetics and pharmaceutical company began its illustrious life as a community health clinic at a 13th-century Florentine...
The Mystery of the Phantom Page Turner
By Ben Marks — A few months back, we received an email from a gentleman named Ian Spellerberg, who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. “Lovely article about letter openers,” he wrote. “However, what is illustrated is a mix of letter openers and paper-knives. They are quite different.” “Paper-knives are dull by design.” In fact, letter openers and paper-knives represent only half of Spellerberg’s expertise on this arcane corner of old office supplies. As the author of , now available in the United...
Visiting Scarfolk, the Most Spectacular Dystopia of the 1970s
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Though adults tend to look back on youth as a time of innocence, childhood is actually terrifying. Kids are always privy to more of the world’s horrors than we realize, and those glimpses of war on the evening news or the mutilation on display in anti-drunk-driving films leave permanent scars on their permeable little minds. "I often couldn’t distinguish between what was real and what had been a vivid nightmare." Richard Littler had a frightening childhood, too, but as a designer and...
Where the Wild Books Are
By Ben Marks — Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. Who hasn't heard a tale of someone finding a rare toy at a garage sale, a dust-covered antique in an attic, or a priceless document hidden inside a beat-up picture frame? “That could be me,” we are supposed to think, and right on cue, we do. When it comes to book-collecting bonanzas, Rebecca Rego Barry has heard ’em all. As the editor of “Fine Books & Collections,” it’s actually part of her job to listen to such stories, and...
When Book Lovers Guarded Their Prized Possessions With Tiny Artworks
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — In the near future, when books are looked upon as objects of pure nostalgia, the concept of a bookplate might need a bit of explaining: Before the reign of e-books, streaming content, and information stored in a mythical “cloud,” people stockpiled hardcovered paper objects full of written words. Of those educated persons who maintained personal libraries of their favorite tomes, the more affluent sometimes commissioned unique, artist-designed bookplates, which were affixed inside the book’s...
Life on Pluto, Circa 1959
By Ben Marks — When NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft flew past Pluto and its moons recently, after journeying more than three billion miles over the course of nine-and-a-half years, much was made of the former planet’s craterless surface. The absence of craters indicates that Pluto is geologically active, which means that in this respect, if no other, Pluto is more like Earth than our pockmarked moon. Perhaps Donald A. Wollheim had an inkling of Earth's similarity to Pluto way back in 1959 when he wrote “The...
From Donation Bin to Sotheby's: How a Rare 19th-Century Bible Almost Got Away
By Ben Marks — On his first day as a volunteer for the Friends of Knight Memorial Library, in March of 2014, John Marks (no relation) was asked to help finalize prices for 200 books and sets that had been selected and pre-priced for one of the library’s twice-annual, vintage-book sales. One of these was a five-volume, 19th-century Torah, grandly titled “The Law of God” and edited and translated by Isaac Leeser. The publication date was listed as 5605 in the Jewish calendar, which in the Gregorian calendar...
Cheap Thrills: The Freakish Fantasy Art of Mexican Pulp Paperbacks
By Ben Marks — In the 1960s and ’70s, tens of millions of eyeballs a month looked forward to the latest surreal compositions on the covers of Mexican pulp fiction. Unlike their counterparts in the United States, where depictions of steamy sex and the promise of somewhat-porny scandal sold best, pulp-fiction covers south of the border usually relied on bizarre visual scenarios, whose WTF weirdness was more important than their overt sexuality—although there was usually plenty of that. Take the covers now...
Naughty Nuns, Flatulent Monks, and Other Surprises of Sacred Medieval Manuscripts
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Flipping through an illustrated manuscript from the 13th century, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Jesus loved a good fart joke. That's because the margins of these handmade devotional books were filled with imagery depicting everything from scatological humor to mythical beasts to sexually explicit satire. Though we may still get a kick out of poop jokes, we aren't used to seeing them visualized in such lurid detail, and certainly not in holy books. But in medieval Europe, before books...
Storybook Apocalypse: Beasts, Comets, and Other Signs of the End Times
By Ben Marks — It’s tempting to dismiss the mid-16th-century depictions of Biblical miracles, flaming comets, multi-headed beasts, and apocalyptic chaos that fill the pages of the “Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs” as the superstitious vestiges of the post-Medieval mind. But according to the co-authors of Taschen’s new, 568-page boxed volume called “Book of Miracles,” the Protestant citizens of Augsburg, Germany, were enthusiastic and active collectors of portrayals of portentous signs, as well as written...
Being The Beatles: Untold Stories from the Fab Four's Legendary North American Tours
By Ben Marks — Like a lot of people of a certain age, I’ll never forget the night I watched The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show." It was February 9, 1964, I was 7 years old, and John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had just invaded America. Coming scant months after the assassination of President Kennedy, the whole country (or at least 73 million television viewers) was ready for an evening of guilt-free fun. "I used to watch them wiggle their butts on stage." Even more...
Extraordinary Collection of Counterculture Literature Up for Auction
By Ben Marks — The first time I met Rick Synchef, I was anxious to see his legendary stash of political ephemera and protest posters from the 1960s, which eventually formed the basis of an article for CollectorsWeekly. Synchef had been collecting political paper and ephemera since he was a student in Madison, Wisconsin, which was a hotbed of political activism in the late '60s. So when I arrived at his home, I was unprepared for the depth and breadth of his other collection of books and periodicals...
Digging Up the Weirdest Old Books and Comics From the Thrift-Store Bargain Bins
By Lisa Hix — When we first encountered Alan Scherstuhl's "Studies in Crap" column over at the "SF Weekly," we knew he was one of us. Every week, he goes digging around thrift stores and flea markets looking for that special book that speaks to him. Sometimes its a Kool-Aid Man comic book where the oversize beverage pitcher busts into orbiting spacecrafts, or a comic wherein pseudo-Archies are raptured up to heaven in a psychedelic swirl. But when Scherstuhl finds the nearly inedible recipe for Rush...
When Being a Lesbian Was Profitable, For Men
By Lisa Hix — The times they are a-changing: Last weekend, lesbian couple Kitty Lambert and Cheryle Rudd made history, exchanging the first gay-marriage nuptials in New York State. Just a few days before, President Obama certified the repeal of the "don't ask don't tell" policy in the U.S. military. But homosexuality has not always been so understood and accepted in U.S. society. In fact, in mid-century America, being a lesbian was seen as aberrant and morally corrupt, and because of its social stigma,...
Great Works of Literature Gone Chick-Lit
By Lisa Hix — If you're a serious collector of literature, you'd probably think it horrifying to alter Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" so that the soldiers are fighting with pillows instead of guns (although adding zombies to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" struck many as a fine idea). So you can imagine how serious female writers must feel when editors tell them, "You need to make this more chick-lit." With this unfortunately common problem in mind, our friends over at The Gloss had a little...
Hellfire and Damnation in Your Back Pocket
By Jim Linderman — I suppose second only to manufacturer-produced cooking pamphlets, one of the least collectible forms of ephemera is the religious tract or book. Since many were free to begin with, they were both printed and tossed with abandon. One evangelist, the now-forgotten A.A. Allen, was printing 55 million pieces of "literature" a year when he passed away of alcohol-induced liver failure. That is one big pile of salvation. With Christian fundamentalism growing, will the popularity of these little...
Rare Books: Collecting Forgeries
By Matthew Haley — Collectors of autographed baseball cards are alert to the existence of forgeries, so they know to be on their guard. But how many book collectors stop to wonder whether their newest acquisition is forged? One book forger who managed to fool some of history’s most celebrated book collectors was Thomas James Wise. A book collector himself, Wise knew that a forged book would become apparent when it was compared to the real deal—the complexities of paper, type, print, and binding make a...
A Visit To the Prelinger Library
By Ben Marks — When you walk into the Prelinger Library, the first things you notice are the three long aisles that run down the length of the space. Ten banks of shelves, each 10 shelves high, flank each aisle, creating six rows of books. There are 30,000 or so volumes here, plus another 30,000 or so pieces of ephemera, from road maps to cell-phone instruction manuals. What you won’t find are card catalogs or librarians, although the library does have a pair of action figures based on Seattle author...
The Last Word on First Editions
By Ben Marks — Strictly speaking, a book’s edition refers to the setting of the text. So the first time you set the text and print a book with it, and then sell a bound book that you’ve just printed, that’s the first edition, first printing. If you use the same setup of text and print it again, that would be the second printing—a printing is therefore a subclass of an edition. The printing is also called the impression, as in first or second impression. In general, the first edition, first printing...
To Catch A Thief: A Rare Book Expert on His Literary Obsessions
By Maribeth Keane and Anne Galloway — I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read books. In grade school, I devoured library books. I also loved comic books, and was wheeling and dealing them as a child—buying them for a nickel, sell them for dime. Bertrand Smith let me into the rare book room, and I bought a Maxwell Parrish "Arabian Nights." I bought an just for the illustrations. At the time I had no idea the artist was a Welsh woman named Gwynedd Hudson. Turns out she only illustrated two books—Alice and Peter Pan. I fell...